vivaoporto writes: The Verge reports that The Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with Warner Bros. over claims that the publisher failed to disclose that it had paid prominent YouTubers for positive coverage of one of its video games. The FTC charge stated that Warner Bros. deceived customers by paying thousands of dollars to social media "influencers," including YouTube megastar PewDiePie, to cover Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without announcing that money had changed hands.

Warner Bros.' deal with the influencers involved stated that they had to make at least one tweet or Facebook post about the game, as well as produce videos with a string of caveats to avoid showing it in a negative light.

Those videos could not express negative opinions about the game or Warner Bros. itself, could not show any glitches or bugs, and must include "a strong verbal call-to-action to click the link in the description box for the viewer to go to the [game's] website to learn more about the [game], to learn how they can register, and to learn how to play the game," according to Ars Technica.

The videos earned more than 5.5 million views for Warner Bros., with PewDiePie's monster subscriber numbers accounting for 3.7 million views on his own.

Influencers were advised to disclose the video's sponsored status under YouTube's "Show More" section, but some did not, and the FTC says this would not have been enough to skirt the rules anyway, as the disclaimer would not have been visible on videos watched through Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sources.

The federal government is preparing to bring down the hammer on one of these toothless watchdogs. Its target is the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which is renowned for maintaining its accreditation of Corinthian Colleges right up to the day that chain of for-profit schools ceased operating in April 2015. Corinthian filed for bankruptcy days later. ACICS accredits some 900 campuses across the nation, giving those schools the formal imprimatur that allows them to collect an estimated $5 billion a year in federal financial aid on behalf of their students.

But its role may be ending. The Department of Education staff on Wednesday recommended the revocation of ACICS's recognition as an accreditation body. That means that schools bearing its seal of approval will have to find a new accreditation body within 18 months or lose their right to collect federal financial aid payments.

The stakes right now are "only" financial, concerning to student loans. When the scope becomes international and the stakes include a green card it will be much hard to prevent this kind of scheme.

Done right anything is possible but human nature in this particular case will be drawn by greed and greed will rapidly pervert the whole process.

That would not only be underhanded (as it amounts to lying to the electorate conflating two issues that are not related) giving more credence to the accusations of "crooked" and "liar" that Trump tries to pin on her but also it could potentially backfire big given the history of the Clintons with eminent domain:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the city's method of seizing land for the Clinton Presidential Library on Thursday, eliminating the last legal roadblock in the way of construction.

The court, in a 6-0 decision with one abstention, said a Little Rock landowner failed to prove that the $200-million library and archive complex wouldn't be a park as the state defines it.

The head of the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation said the dispute over Eugene Pfeifer III's land had been the only thing delaying construction of the 28-acre site on the south bank of the Arkansas River.

"I'm shocked," Pfeifer said. "This is truly disappointing news."

A decision against the city could have forced the foundation to find another site for his planned academic center and museum.

The library ended up being built on land expropriated based on eminent domain so the tactic you proposed is, like I said, underhanded, detrimental to Clinton campaign (as it opens a can of worms that would be better sealed shut) and, in general, undemocratic.

While that's true the nature of the electoral process in the U.S. makes an truly independent candidature all but impossible, with many states having either legislation or codified processes that, along with the media, give an enormous advantage to the major parties.

It is no wonder that "outsiders" like Trump or Bernie prefer to crash the established parties over to run as independent or to found their own parties. It is a two party country and there is no way to even compete in equal footing with the candidates of the big parties.

On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.

In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired, a hard problem to fix as, at the time, it took three years in normal conditions to train a new controller.

They were replaced initially with nonparticipating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non rated personnel, and in some cases by controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. Some military controllers were also used until replacements could be trained.

The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it would take closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.

The only reason that was possible was because

1) the public sentiment was favourable to empty the power of what was perceived to be very corrupt institutions (the unions)

2) the government could get away with things the private sector would never ever be allowed, like using non rated personnel or military air controllers or taking 10 years instead of 3 to normalise the situation and

3) because you, the american people, was there to pick up the tab so no expenses would be spared to break up not only that union but the whole concept of collective bargaining, striking and fighting in equal footing for workers right.

For reference see what happened in the U.K, about the same time.

The situation is not very similar to the workers mentioned in TFA although the only thing they would get by unionise would be to get the company to declare bankruptcy and to reemerge with another name in the same geographical area, same business plan and most likely same portfolio of customers (but without the workers).

Headline should be "FBI Wants To Access Terror Suspect's Skype Records, legally and above the board this time" , because, as reported previously (US Mining Data Directly From 9 Silicon Valley Companies) with PRISM the DHS can pretty much do it already, only not blessed by public courts or clear legislation.

vivaoporto writes: Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

"Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool... that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from", Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company's "Google Ideas" division, wrote in a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials. "Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria," he said.

The exchange on Syria was highlighted by Wikileaks on Saturday. Earlier in the week, the secret-leaking website posted more than 30,000 emails that Clinton sent or received during her tenure leading the State Department.

With all the improvements that are being made to this wonderful site one of the biggest flaws brought in big part by the previous owners (DICE) was the overly politicised topics that not even tangentially touches the historical major focus of this site: technology and its applications.

It is my belief that, for the original audience of this site, some here since before the 9/11, some even from when http colon slash slash was actually pronounced when reading URLs out loud, the main drive to come and read the front page is to catch up with the latest of the technology and its applications.

This kind of politicised subject (the same going for the U.S. elections, ISIS, the refugee crisis and general gossip) already abounds in the mainstream media and for more than a decade this used to be the place to run away from all that, to read about the subjects that are our jobs and our passions and to welcome our robotic overlords.

Unicode, https, burying videos, all that would be secondary if this kind of article continues to be propped up in here.

It is time for some transparency here: did this article even passed through the firehose? People actually voted for it? Maybe times changed and people here are voting for this kind of article to the front page but, otherwise, it would be a great update, maybe the greatest, to go back to the roots of "News for Nerds, stuff that matter".

Either that or at least inform the audience that Slashdot is OK with this kind of articles, that the desired audience is a new audience with a different profile and give us the alternative to go look for an alternative.

Also, taking advantage of the moment, don't forget to review the both the quality of the ads on this site and also to fix the "Thank you, here, have no ads" flag that seems to unset itself all too often and, both on Desktop but also on mobile, happens to miss some ads (screenshot for reference).

About ads, it seems that now most ads on sourceforge are tech related: JumpCloud, Intel, AdWords, Gmail, etc. Slashdot, on the other hand, suffers with all kinds of unrelated ads motivating the users to block them either with the above mentioned flag or outright with adblock. On mobile it used even worse, to the point of being outrageous: autoplaying popover videos whose close button was inaccessible on mobile.

Up until someone finds a way to introduce either a patent encumbered functionality (like H264) or one inherently proprietary (like EME for DRM) to poison the well and keep real independent implementations out of scope for everybody else except the incumbents.

This development can very much be a big reason of concern. Setting aside the fact that this will bring closed source software to an arena where it is mostly non-existent (the scriptable part of the web) this will also open a new vector for malicious scripts to hide.

If it is already a vector today imagine when it is a binary that you cannot even cursorily inspect before running.